Author Archives: Tamer Sameeh

The global drug market is estimated to account for approximately $321 billion per year. Conventionally, illicit drugs used to travel along complex and long supply chains. Nevertheless, the advent of novel darknet marketplaces has started to alter this landscape. Cryptomarkets, or darknet marketplaces, are pillared on anonymizing cryptography and virtual currencies, such as bitcoin, to facilitate illicit transactions between vendors ... Read More »

The Silk Road was by far the first cryptomarket, or darknet marketplace, to gain international recognition in 2011 as an online trading platform facilitating illicit drug trafficking. Since then, the number of darknet marketplaces have greatly increased, and even though a wide range of illegal products are offered on these online marketplaces (stolen credit/debit cards, weapons and counterfeited legal documents ... Read More »

The deep web has opened the door to a novel way of illicit drug trading, via what is referred to as darknet marketplaces or cryptomarkets. Users can now safely purchase illicit drugs from the comfort of their homes, compare products and their prices offered by various vendors, while avoiding being busted by law enforcement agencies (LEAs). Cryptomarkets also greatly reduce ... Read More »

The popularization of the blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies created an urgent need for the development of regulating legislations that are inspired by a thorough understanding of this innovative technology. The autonomous and decentralized nature of the blockchain technology, and the fact that THE existence of a blockchain is totally independent of any control by federal institutions poses enormous challenges to ... Read More »

Bitcoin price has soared during the past few months, which was also associated with a sharp rise in transaction fees. Currently, on average costs around $20 to send a transaction across the bitcoin network. This has forced many businesses and individuals to refrain from using bitcoin, especially that the fees tended to be below $2 a couple of months ago. ... Read More »

Legal marketplaces are governed by federal state law, and market participants hold the right to resort to legal recourse whenever they might be faced with fraudulent behavior. Law enforcement promotes insurance, stability and transparency of commerce taking place across legal markets. Interestingly enough, illegal markets have to somehow emulate the main approaches adopted by legal markets to become successful and ... Read More »

Throughout the past decade, the popularity of Darknet usage has been skyrocketing secondary to the public’s concern regarding their privacy and anonymity on the internet. Most research studies delving into the structural features of darknet communities during the past few years, concluded that most activities taking place in various darknet communities are more or less illegal. However, more recently, many ... Read More »

Anonymity over the world wide web has never been a more critical issue. To achieve bulletproof anonymity, multiple solutions are being currently implemented by internet users all over the world. The most popular of which is the Tor network that represents the busiest anonymous communication network on the internet serving millions of users every day. Tor also enables webmasters to ... Read More »

The Hyperledger project represents an initiative that was launched by the Linux Foundation in December 2015 to build an open source platform for the development of blockchains. The Hyperledger aims at establishing a proficient ecosystem throughout which coders and entrepreneurs can meet up and collaborate to build blockchains. So, Hyperledger is not a cryptocurrency; instead, it is a specialized hub ... Read More »

To be able to illustrate what modifications across a network such as the Tor network could improve it, or what forms of attacks could undermine its security or privacy goals, one has to do some sort of experimentation. The frameworks of such experimentation approaches highly rely on the ultimate glass the experimenter has in mind. An experimenter may choose to ... Read More »

The Tor network depends mainly on resources, which are owned and managed by volunteers, to cater daily for millions of internet users seeking to maintain high levels of anonymity and privacy. As such, these resources have to be efficiently managed, by the Tor network, while also dealing with challenges facing its utility and robustness. A large percentage of the challenges ... Read More »

Wide scale internet censorship attempts by governments have catalyzed the creation of newer techniques to enhance the privacy of internet users and resist various censorship attempts. Tor represents the most widely used system for counteracting censorship and promoting the privacy of internet users. Currently, Tor serves hundreds of thousands of internet users all over the world and transfers approximately 3 ... Read More »

Since the late 1970s, software piracy has grown into a serious problem negatively affecting software developers and undermining their ability to preserve the copyrights of their digital creations. The past 30 years have witnessed significant advancements in various computing technologies. However, developments and innovations in communications technologies have catalyzed software piracy, via provision of high speed delivery, mobility and portability ... Read More »

The best answer for this question would be “it all comes down to how much you will invest.” However, to get a more meaningful answer, there are multiple factors to be considered: 1. The price of bitcoin is constantly changing and the volatility is currently extremely high. One bitcoin is currently worth more than $11,000, and less than a month ... Read More »

Cryptomarkets are special forms of online marketplaces that are hosted on the deep web, and feature a large number of vendors. Buyers and vendors on cryptomarkets enjoy the anonymity provided to them by the deep web, as their web locations are concealed and cryptocurrency payments render it almost impossible to track them. Drug trading on various cryptomarkets has recently evolved ... Read More »